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"An open-minded, respectful attitude is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for making the most out of our interactions with others. If we want to pursue the truth, and persuade others of the truths we think we already know, then it behooves us also to spend some time studying logic, and critical thinking more generally. What makes an argument valid or invalid? What are the common fallacies that can lead us (and others) into error? How can we learn to spot these fallacies in our own and others' thinking? Without a solid understanding of the rules of logic, the best-intentioned debates can easily deteriorate into unproductive chaos."
http://www.quebecoislibre.org/06/060226-3.htm
"Harry appeared fond of joking. From what I could tell, he appreciated the pursuit of happiness nearly as much as he appreciated life, his 'obsession' with which led to his 'obsession' with war, its great adversary; and liberty, for which he fought without flinching throughout his admirable life."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory111.html
"Do you love America? If so, isn't it time you spoke out on behalf of America -- before the president and Congress take away the rest of what made this the land of the free? Or are you just as happy to see America transformed into one more bureaucratic warrior state, like so many of those in Europe and Asia?"
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/browne.php?articleid=8626
"If Americans permit their rulers to intercept their phone calls and email messages, then is there any abuse that people will not accept from Washington? Does the fact that someone works for the government automatically entitled him to know what his neighbors are saying and thinking?"
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0602j.asp
"Lawfakers have forever been undermining the right to peacefully control one's own property. In fact one could say that undermining justly held property is the greater part of what lawfakers do, and that includes the lawfakers who are still puzzlingly referred to as 'judges.' The assault started a little before 1964 -- 4,000 B.C., maybe? -- but the 'civil rights' law imposed in '64 by the Central Government was one of the most crippling, excuse me, differently abling blows ever inflicted on Americans' property rights."
http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/lights141.htm
"To prevail in the struggle for national self-preservation, common Americans must neither divide themselves nor let themselves be divided over secondary, indecisive issues. Unless Americans unite to reassert their control over the two great powers of government--the Power of the Purse (constitutional "Money") and especially the Power of the Sword ("the Militia of the several States")--they are lost, and with them this country, too, irretrievably."
http://www.newswithviews.com/Vieira/edwin34.htm
"It is important for libertarians to oppose the state and its destructive rulers regardless of party affiliation or rhetoric, both of which are democratic illusions conjured up to conceal the violence of state power. Far too many libertarians have gone the way of conservatives in their loyalty to George W. Bush. Most of them were probably never libertarians in the first place. ... [W]e must remember not to blame the officeholder alone. We must remember that the system itself is rotten and inhumane, and distinguish our program and ideology from those of opportunist critics on the right, just as we should today be wary of those on the left."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory109.html
"The popular imagination often associates 'anarchy' with violence and lawlessness even though what we actually seek is a genuinely lawful society -- one with a polycentric legal system that would protect people from the mass murder and other crimes states are currently empowered to commit through their monopoly of law and security. It's time to change that."
http://www.bradspangler.com/blog/archives/354
"So, what does all this tell us? All this tells us that the political paradigm has never worked and that the current 'democracy' is just a fable. This fable has only caused more wars; it has controlled, manipulated and destroyed lives, and it has undermined Liberty rather than protecting it."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/61/chuong/chuong1.html
"There is no way the warlords of Washington -- or any government -- can control the Internet. This is true because of the nature of the technology, and also because the very act of forbidding something makes it attractive -- especially to Americans, a cantankerous and inherently anarchic people who don't like being told what they can or cannot know."
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=8628
"IP is the future of global communication on all levels. ... And that brings me back to the peer-to-peer schemes I discussed a little last week. By using excess upload capacity of client nodes as repeaters, putting together 64 gigabits-per-second actually isn't that hard. Stealing 256 kilobits per client would require a total of 256,000 participating clients to do the job ... There are some who believe Bit Torrent alone can do the job, but I feel that a true media market is going to require more components than are currently offered in Bit Torrent."
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20060302.html
"The ideal political model for Iraq is Switzerland's cantonal system. Historically, Switzerland, unlike most European countries, was made up of several different major ethnic groups -- Germans, French, Italians and Rhaeto-Romansch. Over the centuries, conflicts have arisen between these groups, who differ in language, religion (Catholic and Protestant) and culture. The resolution to the conflict was to allow the warring groups to govern themselves."
http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/wew/articles/06/conflict.html
"America is headed for a soft dictatorship by the end of Bush's second term. Whether any American has civil rights will be decided by the discretionary power of federal officials. The public in general will tolerate the soft dictatorship as its discretionary powers will mainly be felt by those few who challenge it."
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts02272006.html
"The U.S. government should have no power to block a transaction between two foreign companies, even if one is government-owned. But it is amazing that the White House can be so incompetent when it comes to politics: Bush could see his first veto overridden by a Republican Congress. It doesn't inspire much confidence in the administration's ability in more substantive endeavors."
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0603a.asp
"In total, the United States has contributed more than $7 billion in aid to these dictators. In North Korea, Belarus, Ethiopia, Swaziland, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, the United States has contributed more than 20 percent of the total aid these countries have received from OECD countries."
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1682
"It happens all the time. If the antiwar movement takes on the Democrats for their bitter shortcomings, a few liberals are bound to criticize us for not hounding Bush instead. It doesn't even have to be an election year to get the progressives fired up. They just don't seem to get it."
http://www.antiwar.com/frank/?articleid=8609
"Before reading the report, I wouldn't have expected to find myself thinking that such a course of action was either likely or possible; after reading the report, I don't know why we would run the risk of not impeaching the man. We have before us in the White House a thief who steals the country's good name and reputation for his private interest and personal use; a liar who seeks to instill in the American people a state of fear; a televangelist who engages the United States in a never-ending crusade against all the world's evil, a wastrel who squanders a vast sum of the nation's wealth on what turns out to be a recruiting drive certain to multiply the host of our enemies."
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/022706C.shtml
"Are any of the Democrats pointing fingers at Bush really concerned about the cronyism and the business as usual corruption that proceeded the port deal? Treasury Secretary John Snow was formerly the CEO of the railroad company, CSX. After Snow left CSX for Washington, the company sold its international port operations to Dubai Ports World for more than a billion dollars. Yet another extraordinarily profitable coincidence for the Bush team."
http://www.blackcommentator.com/173/173_freedom_rider_bushs_arab_cronies.html
"The assertion was made that ' ... the "marketplace" is itself a creation of coercive systems. Free people who preceeded the last 10k years of control-freakism didn't go about their business in any kind of "marketplace".' The question that comes to mind -- indeed, which was asked and not really answered -- is, 'How, then, did they go about their business?' The answer is simple, really. They did rely on markets and marketplaces -- they simply weren't called that."
http://www.sunnimaravillosa.com/archives/00000625.html
"If we want to understand ourselves, then a rigourous appraisal of historical events is essential. So are we now to jail those who don't agree with official history? The issue is not whether a 'David Irving' is right or wrong, but whether he has the right to question the historical record. The issue of free speech covers a lot more ground than just cartoons and historical research, of course. It covers everything."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/61/macgregor/macgregor3.html
"The proliferation-proof, meltdown-proof pebble-bed technology development began in Germany more than 30 years ago and was continued in South Africa, but has apparently now been perfected in China." Notice which technologically advanced nation that often once pioneered new technologies is not listed?
http://www.antiwar.com/prather/?articleid=8610
"Patents are a key form of state-privilege by which people get rich at the expense of others. The patent system would have no place in a real free market. It is said that patents are needed to encourage innovation, but now the truth is clear for all to see."
http://sheldonfreeassociation.blogspot.com/2006/03/blackberry-case-property-rights.html
"The US government has led the way diplomatically to transform the world's hodge-podge of tariffs, ad hoc trade deals, and protectionist barriers to a regime of free trade in goods, services, and the free flow of capital. So they claim, anyhow. Yet when people and firms from other places try to play by the very rules that the US government says it advocates, the resulting mudfight and rhetorical excesses from the news media are indeed a tawdry spectacle."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/61/massoud/massoud4.html
"Who bears the costs of these early release crimes? In Hatfield's case, it's hard to see beyond the convenience store clerk and her family, isn't it? That burden is large and intense, no doubt like that experienced by thousands of other victims of parolee and probationer crime. At the risk of trivializing these costs, however, we can easily argue that all of us incur costs because pollutants like Hatfield make our social environments less attractive."
http://www.mises.org/story/2065
"The first and gravest danger to a citizen is war. It is governments, of course, that always start wars, but those governments always say that they are protecting citizens from the aggression of other governments. In other words, other governments are bad, therefore war cannot be avoided -- and so we must be partially enslaved by our own government to protect us from these inevitable wars."
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/molyneux.php?articleid=8604
"[I]t's important to keep in mind that all this spying and other violations of civil liberties are just part and parcel of the U.S. Empire and its interventionist policies. That is, the policies, including the president's invasion and war of aggression against Iraq, generate the anger and hatred that produce the terrorist counterstrikes, which then provide the president with the excuse to claim and exercise omnipotent power to fight the terrorists."
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0602i.asp
"[I]t is highly unlikely that Ahmadinejad would have ever been elected president if Bush and his crony-cranks had not relentlessly and ruthlessly undercut every attempt by the moderate government of Khatami to forge a new relationship between Iran and the United States. The greatest opportunity came after September 11, of course, when Iran sought to help the US break al Qaeda, a common enemy that threatened both nations. But Bush and his circle, as we now know, were not interested in breaking al Qaeda or fighting terrorism...."
http://www.counterpunch.org/floyd03032006.html
"In his last years, few writers have been as good as Harry on all aspects of the Bush administration. After 9-11, when others fell silent or acquiesced to regime priorities, he stuck his neck out and defended personal liberty against the surveillance state, less government against the homeland-security state, and peace against the war on terror. He never hesitated. He wrote the truth with grace and good humor, and clicked 'Send'."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/harry-browne.html
"This was one of the greatest bureaucratic coups in history -- defining the problem in such a way that the only solution was a massive expansion of government power. ... the USDA resolved to fundamentally change the nature of agriculture in order to guarantee farmers perpetually high prices."
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0511c.asp
"Part of finding freedom in an unfree world to Harry was freeing yourself from various 'traps,' including any expectations on others' part, or any cause's part, that you owed them a damn thing."
http://www.reason.com/hitandrun/2006/03/harry_browne_ri.shtml#012822
"A majority of soldiers want to come home, and the war is the only thing keeping them there. If the government let them all quit when they wanted to, it’s hard to see how the war could persist. To support the war, then, is to effectively be against the troops who want to return home. ... Supporting this war might go along with supporting many things. ... But if you support treating the troops like human beings, which necessarily means allowing them the right to quit their government jobs offered to them on false promises, you must oppose this war."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory110.html
"With 1,300 dead Iraqis -- and counting -- since the bombing of the Golden Dome last week, Iraq remains poised at the precipice of destruction. It's anyone's guess as to whether the crisis will revert to its previous state of mere insurgency and grinding daily violence, or plunge into a multi-sided religious civil war. If the latter, a thousand more dead Iraqis each week -- or more -- might be a routine occurrence. Either way, however, one thing is clear. Already dead is the Bush administration's hope for a neat drawdown of U.S. forces in Iraq as Election 2006 approaches. Voters who go to the polls in the United States in November will be staring directly into the face of the catastrophe of the Bush-Cheney Iraq policy."
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/02/28/iraq_preparing_for_the_worst.php
"Some pundits have used Iran's apparent quest for an atomic weapon as an excuse to push, with a straight face, the silly idea of inducting Israel into NATO. The idea is not just absurd because NATO stands for North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and Israel is nowhere near the North Atlantic, but because Israeli security has never been better and doesn't need NATO protection."
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1680
"In his An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) he argued that government is a corrupting force in society, perpetuating dependence and ignorance, but that it will be rendered increasingly unnecessary and powerless by the gradual spread of knowledge. Politics will be displaced by an enlarged personal morality as truth conquers error and mind subordinates matter. In this development the rigorous exercise of private judgment, and its candid expression in public discussion, plays a central role...."
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/godwin/
"He developed the early work he had done at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on methods to convert the information on punched cards into electrical impulses. These impulses in turn would activate mechanical counters. He used at first the punch that was used for tickets on the railway to make the holes in the cards."
http://www-groups.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/%7Ehistory/Mathematicians/Hollerith.html
"In this most intense phase of the Cold War, Linus Pauling's name was often in the news--as when he circulated a petition against atmospheric nuclear testing and the excessive buildup of nuclear arsenals. The petition was presented in early 1958 to the United Nations after being signed by some 9,000--eventually more that 11,000-scientists worldwide. The U.S. government's opposing position was defended--sometimes vituperatively--by most of the press and by various scientists, such as physicist Edward Teller, many of whom were federal employees."
http://lpi.oregonstate.edu/lpbio/lpbio2.html
"Science Fiction adventure stars Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Bai Ling, Giovanni Ribisi, Angelina Jolie, Laurence Olivier; written and directed by Kerry Conran. 'Do you like science fiction, graphic novels, comic books or old movie serials? If any of those ... appeal to you, I suspect this movie will also. ... [A]lthough the film deals with calamitous events potentially affecting the entire Earth and everyone on it, actions of individuals in the private sector overwhelmingly dominate in all sides of the conflict'."
http://endervidualism.com/agora/sky_capt_wot_2004.htm
"I'm not a devotee of the romantic tear-jerker myself, but I can see a distinction between Sirk's better melodramas, dreamlike stories that invite the audience to find a garbled reflection of their inner lives onscreen, and a movie like Brokeback Mountain, which is too literal to be a dreamscape, too careless to be realistic (how did a country record released in 1988 end up in a jukebox in 1978?), and too timid to be a bold political statement."
http://www.reason.com/links/links030306.shtml
"As Serenity hits DVD shelves across the land [Britain], we caught up with the mighty Joss Whedon for a little chat about the continuing adventures of our favourite Firefly-class vessel, his future plans, and his love of a certain Abba anthem. But beware, ahead be BIG spoilers suitable only for those who have already seen Serenity."
http://www.empireonline.com/interviews_and_events/interview.asp?IID=459
"In a press conference on the steps of the Capitol Monday, Congressional Democrats announced that, despite the scandals plaguing the Republican Party and widespread calls for change in Washington, their party will remain true to its hopeless direction."
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/45793
"I don't know exactly what the Federal Reserve Board is except that Wikipedia says it has something to do with our fiat money. I must protect our fiat money at all costs. I must protect the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board at all costs. I must protect him from Marxists and Maoists and Socialists and Third Worlders and especially those wild-eyed Anarcho-Austrian free market libertarian gold bug economists. If someone picks up a gold standard and tries to strike the Chairman with it I will throw my body in front of whoever that guy is that replaced St. Alan Greenspan. As a dedicated and highly trained mindless bureaucratic tin soldier I must protect the Status Quo at all costs."
http://www.freecannon.com/GunControlForBureaucrats.htm
"Hi there and welcome to another fine edition of the Conventional Wisdom Mailbag. I'm your host, Conventional Wisdom. You may remember me from such popular misconceptions as 'Mariah Carey's career is over,' 'Saddam has weapons,' and 'Don't worry, those levees should hold back the water.' This week, I'll be answering questions from several of JDM's astute readers."
http://www.freeliberal.com/archives/001904.html
"[I]t seems to me that when we've broken with tradition, there have been two kinds of change. Good and bad. Specifically, liberal and statist. 'Liberal' in this sense meaning the advancement of individual rights and freedoms, statist meaning, broadly, coercive measures that force change. Change that empowers the individual vs. change that empowers the government. Change that makes people free vs. change that makes them less free."
http://www.partialobserver.com/article.cfm?id=1766
"[P]hysicians who want to earn a higher income and to have the freedom to treat their patients in accordance with their own medical judgment will flee the socialized system for the private system and leave basically only the dregs of medicine for what will remain of the socialized system. That is what the government's prohibition of private medical care is designed to prevent."
http://www.quebecoislibre.org/06/060226-4.htm
"After ten years involved in the academic side of HIV research, as well as in the academic world at large, I truly believe that the blame for the universal, unconditional, faith-based acceptance of such a flawed theory falls squarely on the shoulders of those among us who have actively endorsed a completely unproven hypothesis in the interests of furthering our careers. Of course, hypotheses in science deserve to be studied, but no hypothesis should be accepted as fact before it is proven, particularly one whose blind acceptance has such dire consequences."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig7/culshaw1.html
"I found myself thinking how much Abraham Lincoln and FDR are celebrated among our greatest presidents, even though Lincoln presided over the evisceration of the concept that America is a federation of independent states and Roosevelt set in motion a 70-year erosion of liberty that is increasing in speed year by year. I suspect it has something to do with how history is written by the victors - and at this stage in our nation's history, those who oppose states' rights and individual rights clearly have the upper hand. When the original concept of America is restored, Lincoln and FDR likely will be redefined as among our nation's greatest villains."
http://bwrmontag.blogspot.com/2006/02/bws-book-report-time-for-truth.html
"Oh yes, he offered financial advice about where to put your money and how to invest it wisely. But after reading these books, the reader also had learned how the Federal Reserve creates inflation, why the only real and honest money is a commodity like gold, and why we need to get government out of almost everything if liberty is to be restored."
http://www.fee.org/in_brief/default.asp?id=311
"If German officials who were ordered to do such things in the 1930s had spoken out early and loudly enough, the German people might have been alerted to the atrocities being perpetrated in their name and tried harder to stop them. When my grandchildren ask, 'What did you do, Grandpa, to stop the torture,' I want to be able to tell them that I tried to honor my oath, taken both as an Army officer and an intelligence officer, to defend the Constitution of the United States -- and that I not only spoke out strongly against the torture, but also sought a symbolic way to dissociate myself from it."
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